This one is even more on-the-border (nooooow) than usual, right exactly on the edge between Premisestan and Irrelevania. The game-relevant part of it is, Cabel Sasser (Mastodon) is a long-time internet person who 16 years ago made for Youtube Buggy Saint’s Row: The Musical (we’ve linked it before), and more recently helped publish Untitled Goose Game and produce the Playdate (which we’ve written about before, even though I still don’t have one argh).

But this post has nothing to do with any of those things! On Cabel’s blog (and a couple of other sites-one year it was Flickr), for ten years, he made annual posts where he presented firework packaging found in local shops, until his city passed a fireworks ban in 2016.

We’re truly all the poorer for that, and more than once I’ve asked him, on Twitter, if he might someday continue the tradition. (Future readers: Twitter is a microblogging service that used to exist.) He’s never replied, which is how most people on the internet react to me, but I’m happy that he probably knows they were appreciated.

Here are links to each post he made, and every one of them is terrific fun:

2007 – 2008 – 2009 –2010 – 2011 – 2012 – 2013 – 2014 – 2015 – 2016

Here are just a very few highlight images to whet the appetite. Warning: Shoots Flaming Balls!

I’d like to point out this package in particular:

I presume all of the images in these fireworks packages are stolen by their creators from some place. Thing is, I know exactly where this image was stolen from! It’s the backglass of the Williams Junk Yard pinball machine! That face in the lower right, at the controls of the crane and partly hidden by the name, that’s Crazy Bob!

Maybe the Chinese artist assumed, in 2015, that Junk Yard was some super-popular United States property that would instantly fill their coffers with tasty lucre. We’ll never know.

Believe me when I say this just scratches the surface. The internet is not forever, so please, visit Cabel’s sites and enjoy them while you can!

rodneylives